Format: Talk
Duration: 60 minutes

Abstract

Many agile projects struggle with managing the features of the software being built. Finding product owners is difficult, and product ownership seems to require superhuman powers.

We propose that because software development has little to offer the larger art of product development agile sometimes marginalizes these activities and hides them behind such abstractions as product owners and business value. Product ownership is oversimplified from a major business function into a role perhaps played by a single person.

We present a simplified model for product development and contrast it with agile and filmmaking. Software, like filmmaking, needs a pre-production phase to elaborate what the product should be. After pre-production has been completed, product ownership becomes trivial.

Detailed description & timetable

0-5 Something is missing

• "How do I create a backlog? How do I calculate business value?"
• "Where to find good product owners?"
• "What are we building, and why?"
• Fretting in development, product design rework
• Spikes to figure out what the software should do

5-10 Product development vs. software development

10-20 Simplified model of product development

• Contrasted with waterfall, RUP, Scrum
• Product Lifecycle Management
• Filmmaking
  • Development and pre-production
  • Production
  • Post-production

20-25 Pre-production in software

• Tools
• When is it done?

25-30 How separating pre-production and production phases helps software projects

• Product vision, features
• Backlog creation & prioritization
• Domain analysis, baseline architecture
• Roadmapping

30-35 Agilists:

• "It is the customer's / business development's / concept designer's problem!"
• "If you aren't doing it within iterations, you are not doing agile."
• Product owner role a cop-out?
• When timeboxes do not fit the problem
• Experiences from game and consumer portal design

35-40 Pre-production always exists

• Possibly outside your scope
• Greenfield projects
• Projects vs. in-house development
• Subcontracting

40-50 Lessons to take home

50-60 Q&A

Bios

Marko Taipale is Lean/Agile coach and CTO of Huitale, which conveniently allows him to field test agile in product development.

Ari Tanninen has been a software dude(* for a decade and is currently in the process of moving from "how?" to "what?" and "why?". He talks about and even does some agile every now and then, and is most often seen organizing monthly Agile Dinners in Helsinki.

*) engineer, developer, tester, designer, architect, scrummaster, troubleshooter, and generic resource